Translation is a minefield at the best of times but whereas telling your Spanish penpal you enjoy ‘long walks along the massacre’ can be a tad embarassing, it is nothing compared to the lasting damage to finances and reputation that a business mistranslation can incur. From awkward social faux-pas to accidentally sinking huge deals, even the smallest translation errors have cost businesses money, clients and respect on a massive scale. Below are some of the biggest and most common ‘oopsies’ in the translation industry:

Cultural Nuances

Cultural views are key. In many languages, even something as basic as sentence structure and types of words changes depending on who you’re talking to. This isn’t just politeness – it’s almost a whole new language.

This has caused havoc with many novice Japanese speakers who, upon hearing many names ending in ‘-san’, then add it to their own name – which is very taboo in Japanese culture. Referring to yourself as ‘Mike-san’ or ‘Lucy-san’ is effectively saying ‘I am incredibly important’ and we all know what we think of THAT guy in the office.

There are also literally dozens of honourifics other than -san which convey varying levels of respect. Even not using one is a bold statement, essentially saying that you and your conversational partner are such close friends that you’re beyond that. Within business, it is not uncommon for each individual level of management to have its own honorific (such as ‘bucho’, meaning ‘boss/head of a section’ ).

Using the wrong one is a very embarrassing and insulting mistake.

Understanding politeness and cultural norms is important with any culture, but especially so in East Asia. Always make sure your translator understands the people behind the language or you’ll end up looking like the ‘bucho’ of all idiots.

Direct Questions

Asking questions in a foreign language is always a tricky business, especially in advertising. The California Milk Processor Board should have had this in mind when they launched their ‘Got Milk?’ campaign in Spanish towards the Hispanic market – instead of asking them if they ‘Got Milk?’ it instead accused them of lactating, effectively alienating a $1.3 trillion market.

Let’s see them milk some profits out of that one.

Homophones and Homographs

Sometimes a single letter can make all the difference. Imagine the horror of discovering your hot date with Briar turned out to be a hot date with Brian. Likewise, there is a world of difference between ‘braking the car’ and ‘breaking the car’.

This was a tough lesson for Schwepps when they attempted a marketing campaign in Italy, with a mistranslation of ‘Schwepps Tonic Water’ appearing as ‘Schwepps Toilet Water’ on advertisements.

Delicious!

Literal Translation

This is pretty much the single biggest culprit for translation errors of all sizes. It is the number one golden rule for translators across the globe and the one most amateurs fall prey to – do not translate literally.

Imagine this – you’re about to go on stage for the performance of your life. Your father is with you backstage and he grabs you by the shoulder, leans in and says ‘Break a leg, kid!’. In English it’s an (admittedly odd) positive saying of support. Now, imagine you translated this literally into another language. Instead, your father leans in close and says ‘I hope you get injured, you tiny child!’.

Harsh!

Most commonly, these translation errors occur in direct translation for signage. It is not uncommon to see the sign ‘Do not touch yourself’ in small stores and stalls across China. This is not due to a sharp rise in perverts but is, in fact, a direct translation from the Chinese meaning ‘Please do not touch the items yourself’.

Online automatic translators are the single biggest culprits of this. Avoid at all costs! Pepsi famously learned this the hard way when they launched a massive ad campaign in China, with their literally translated tagline ‘Come alive with Pepsi’ coming out the other side as ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back to life’.

All of these translation errors are easy to make, but difficult to fix. The most important thing you can do is leave it to the professionals. As HSBC will tell you of their $10 million fix-up of a botched translation in an ad campaign – cheap translators are very, very expensive. Translate in haste, repent in leisure.

Get yourself a real translation agency. It’ll save you selling toilet water and hurling lactation-related accusations at your customer base. In the world of translation – quality is key.

Author Bio

Mike Parsons enjoys travelling and working with many different cultures. He currently works for Kwintessential.co.uk, a company that cover a wide range of translation services in the UK.

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This is a guest post by Albert Brown

Why translation services needed?

In general perception, global economy doesn’t come to our mind when we consider interpretation services. We normally think of it as somebody having a thorough knowledge of the root and destination languages, who helps others to understand some different languages and let the communication process flow between two or more people. Translation service has a huge contribution in helping people to overcome the language barrier. But did you know it also plays a significant part in boosting the global economy?

For a company preparing to step into the global market, translation service is a must to function properly. Companies may be doing business on a giant scale in and around their local area but when they want to expand out, they’re almost unknown in their target market and require a lot of hard work to get themselves introduced. Interpretation services bridge the gap between these companies and locals of the target country.

Without language services, it is impossible for a company to improve its own financial standing as well as contribute towards the global economy. To make a footprint in the global market, it is the first and foremost criteria for a company to join hands with a good translation service provider. It greatly enhances the client relationship along with helping it strengthen its position in the global marketplace.

Issue on the translation of economics

In today’s world of information society and globalization, when global economy mainly depends on the distribution and production process along with communication and information, language services play a key role. Banks and other financial institutions operate in various languages to increase their customer base. Multinational companies release documents in various languages for the sake of service expansion and to reach every corner of the global market.

With the increasing growth of “LCCS” or “low-cost country sourcing” where a company imports materials from the countries with lower production and labor costs like Brazil, China, India and Eastern Europe to decrease operational costs, the need of translating franchise agreements, contracts, financial documents, company documents and associated documentations is growing rapidly. Interpretation services occupy a centralized position in the prospective cross-border “M&A” (mergers and acquisitions) which mainly depends on effective and efficient exchange of information between all the involved parties responsible for the transaction.

For addressing this, many research avenues are created that are connected to economic and technical translation services and the challenges related to it. Unlike other subject-related translations like technical translation and legal translation, economic translation has become an uncommon topic of special issues of TS (Translation Studies) journals. As an outcome, economic translation research is spread over various publications and aims at some chosen isolated issues. Such language services mostly focus on the economic terminologies.

Why is translation so important in the global economy?

Translation applications act like important resources for both the translators and normal people and the sale and design of these apps and various web-paced platforms are a flourishing segment in the language industry. A translation project creates numerous job openings distributed among various platforms.

Many language services companies that manage high volume translation projects employ not only translators but graphic/formatting artists, proofreaders, project managers and administrative staff who look after the project requirements. Hiring of such professionals is done by scouting for talent across the globe. All of this jointly contributes to a flourishing translation industry, which is forecasted to reach $37 billion by the year 2018 throughout the world.

Advice on language service

Communication languages usually undergo a change along with a change in the global business mode. Economic development has significantly impacted the popular communication languages used for international businesses.

Accordingly, it has developed the popularity of admissions in various second language courses in universities and colleges. Though it’s difficult to talk about the exact way that would help someone learn a language as his/her second language, such learning does help to enhance the overall employability for sure. Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, Chinese, American Sign Language, Russian, German and Portuguese are some of the languages worth learning.

Before going out to learn a new language, some important factors need to be taken into consideration. These include your future plans after learning the language such as availing a job in a global business, working overseas, becoming an interpreter or opting for a job in the government sector.

How translation improves the economy

Economic growth of a country depends upon various factors. One of the most significant factors that contribute to the economic development is the total count of industries that manufacture quality products or provide quality services. It has been observed that a country with developed economy helps the services and industries to grow rapidly.

Thus, industrial development and economic development are dependent on each other. The translation industry, especially the business and technical translation services sectors, have developed rapidly over the last few years. This sector has excellent growth opportunity, especially in the countries where each day a new business avenue is opening up in the market and opportunities are overflowing as a result of globalization.

The local markets too are flooded with foreign products and a significant number of foreign countries are rendering their services in these local markets. It has been observed that in a developed economical condition, the cross-border exchange is not merely restricted to products and services. Rather, it extends to a significant amount of cultural exchange as well.

This exchange is directly connected to economic development. After all, more economical development means more cultural exchange. Interpretation services play a key role in bridging the gap between two cultures, thus helping in the exchange of literature, knowledge, services and products and much more.

Author Bio:

Albert Brown, passionate writer & translation consultant. He is fond of reading about different cultures & traditions being followed across the world. He loves visiting new places and learning different languages. Reading and writing about the importance of language and its variations is something that keeps him busy during free time. Guiding people about the right source is something he is known for. Find out more about Albert’s company – Translation Excellence here.

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In order to get your message across to your target audience you need to hire a professional translator. Here are the reasons why:

After working many years for a number of good translation companies, I have frequently been asked to evaluate other translator’s jobs. This is partly due to the fact that they need more Swedish translators on the team, partly because they know and trust the quality of my translations, and therefore trust me to evaluate other Swedish translators. Sometimes the clients or other translators ask me what I look for when evaluating other translations. Based on my experience in evaluating other Swedish translations for Language Service Providers and my experience as a grader for the Swedish certification exam for ATA, I have compiled a list of points that I consider during my evaluations.

First I read through the whole text to get a general feel for the quality and style.

Then I compare the translation to the source text and look for omissions.

After these two initial tasks are done, I start going through the text sentence by sentence and follow these guidelines:

1. Are there any typos, misspellings, omissions or grammar errors?
2. Numbers and measurements – Are the numbers and measurements transferred appropriately for the target language? Are the conversions correct?
3. Consistency – Are the terms consistent throughout the text?
4. Fluency – Does the text flow in the target language?
5. Comprehension – How well did the translator comprehend the source? Does it show that the translator has expertise in the subject area?
6. Accuracy – How accurate is the translation of the terms and concepts?
7. Style – Is the style of the translation consistent with the style of the source? Has the translator used proper idiomatic language for the subject matter?
8. Audience – Is the translation appropriate for the intended audience?
9. Non-translatables – Are names and trademarks preserved correctly?
10. Diacritric marks – Has the translator used commas, exclamation points, semi colon etc. properly for the target language. The use often differs between the source and target language, at least for English and Swedish.

Based on these guidelines I can then make a general judgment of the translation quality and also give specific examples to the client, plus recommendations to the translator.

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I know you all probably know what all these terms mean, but the definitions I found for translation, localization, internationalization and transcreation were very interesting. The first three terms were taken from Wikipedia, but transcreation did not exist on Wikipedia yet, also that interesting. They are all very dear terms to me, so here you go:

Translation is the comprehension of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text, likewise called a “translation,” that communicates the same message in another language. The text that is translated is called the source text, and the language that it is translated into is called the target language. The product is sometimes called the target text.

Translation, when practiced by relatively bilingual individuals but especially when by persons with limited proficiency in one or both languages, involves a risk of spilling-over of idioms and usages from the source language into the target language. On the other hand, inter-linguistic spillages have also served the useful purpose of importing calques and loanwords from a source language into a target language that had previously lacked a concept or a convenient expression for the concept. Translators and interpreters have thus played an important role in the evolution of languages and cultures.[1]

However, localization and internationalization is not separated, which I think they should be. Here is the joint definition:

In computing, internationalization and localization (also spelled internationalisation and localisation, see spelling differences) are means of adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

The terms are frequently abbreviated to the numeronym i18n (where 18 stands for the number of letters between the first i and last n in internationalization, a usage coined at DEC in the 1970s or 80s[1]) and L10n respectively, due to the length of the words. The capital L in L10n helps to distinguish it from the lowercase i in i18n
Some companies, like Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems, use the term “globalization” for the combination of internationalization and localization.[2][3] Globalization can also be abbreviated to g11n.[4]

Lionbridge has a good explanation of the difference between the two:

Internationalization readies your product for global markets and ensures it can be localized easily. It is the designing and re-engineering of a product so that it can be localize easily for global markets. It is important to complete internationalization before localization begins; otherwise, you may need to reengineer your product in parallel with localization.

Transcreation is perhaps such a new word that Wikipedia has no definition yet. Here is one definition I found:

Transcreation: Adaptation, mainly used in drama contexts, is defined as “
the ‘freest’ form of translation” and one where “… the SL [source language] culture [is] converted to the TL [target language] culture and the text rewritten” (p. 46).The idea of rewriting a text to adapt it to the norms of the target culture, to the point that little trace is left of its source, seems to be at the root of transcreation, too. Nowadays often used in advertising and the media, transcreation is a portmanteau word made by combining together translation and creation, in order to emphasise the considerable amount of creativity required in the process. (From http://www.airy-eel.blogspot.com)

Check also:

• How to Reach the Swedish Market with Transcreation
• Five Things That Differentiate Translation and Transcreation
• Getting the Terminology Right: When to Use a Linguist, Interpreter or Translator

Based on the previous blog you are hopefully convinced that hiring a professional translator for a translation job is the right way to go. But how can you tell whether you have found a professional translator or not? Here are some details to pay attention to.

A professional translator is:

– Educated in both source and target languages
– Translating only into his/her native language and is proficient/bilingual in the source language
– Specialized in a few specific subject areas, that usually are closely related to the translator’s background
– Someone with several years of experience in transferring messages from one language to another, either through education and/or work experience
– A good writer
– Experienced in both cultures of the target and source languages
– Passionate about his/her profession and loves to convey the content and intent of the text as exactly as possible to the target language, with appropriate style and terminology.
– Giving attention to detail
– Courteous, reliable, respectful, honest, responsible, and competent.

Did I forget anything? Do you agree? I would love to hear what you think.

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